AGAMBEN CRITICISM SHELL - wcdebate.com · Web viewIt is the suspension of such procedures that, according to Giorgio Agamben, characterizes the state of emergency, in which all

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Agamben Critique and Answers

Agamben Critique and Answers...............................................................................................................................1Agamben K – 1NC Shell 1/2......................................................................................................................................2Agamben K – 1NC Shell 2/2......................................................................................................................................3Agamben K – Discourse Key.....................................................................................................................................4Agamben K – Link – War on Terror..........................................................................................................................5Agamben K – Link – Bare Life...................................................................................................................................6Agamben K – Link – Human Rights...........................................................................................................................7Agamben K – Link – Citizenship................................................................................................................................8Agamben K – Alternative – Universal Community...................................................................................................9Agamben K – Alternative – Incomplete Identity....................................................................................................10Agamben K – Alternative – Incomplete Identity....................................................................................................11Agamben K – Alternative – Whatever-Being..........................................................................................................12Agamben K – A2: Permutation...............................................................................................................................13

A2: Agamben K – Alternative Fails – Weakens Resistance.....................................................................................14A2: Agamben K – Alternative Fails – Disables Universalism...................................................................................15A2: Agamben K – Alternative Fails – Dooms Activism............................................................................................16A2: Agamben K – Alternative Fails – No Coming Community.................................................................................17A2: Agamben K – Permutation Solves....................................................................................................................18A2: Agamben K – State Good.................................................................................................................................19A2: Agamben K – Human Rights Good...................................................................................................................20A2: Agamben K – Human Rights Good – Resist Biopolitics.....................................................................................21A2: Agamben K – Bad Scholarship – Essentializes Human Rights...........................................................................22A2: Agamben K – Bad Scholarship..........................................................................................................................23


Agamben K – 1NC Shell 1/2

A. DISCOURSE SHAPES THE WAY WE VIEW STATE POLICIES AND VIOLENCEGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, 2000. MEANS WITHOUT END: NOTE ON POLITICS, p. 93.

State power today is no longer founded on the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence — a monopoly that states share increasingly willingly with other nonsovereign organizations such as the United Nations and terrorist organizations; rather, it is founded above all on the control of appearance (of doxa). The fact that politics constitutes itself as an autonomous sphere goes hand in hand with the separation of the face in the world of spectacle—a world in which human communication is being separated from itself. Exposition thus transforms itself into a value that is accumulated in images and in the media, while a new class of bureaucrats jealously watches over its management.

B. PEACE AND WAR BECOMES OBSOLETE TERMS THAT CREATE A NEED FOR SECURITYBen Moretti, Der Standard, February 3rd, 2003.Accessed June 7, 2004, http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0303/msg00099.html

It is the suspension of such procedures that, according to Giorgio Agamben, characterizes the state of emergency, in which all sovereign power is assumed by the police. It surely is no coincidence that the new interventions are often likened to police operations, quite as if they were a matter of the superpower's official duties. In a paradoxical way, this state of emergency seems to establish itself as a permanent condition in which the difference between "war" and "peace" becomes obsolete because both terms are dissolved in the technological spectacle of "security" - a kind of cold peace that rests on the permanent possibility of war. Consequently, the appeal speaks of "peace" only in conjunction with "security", while arguing in favour of war.

C. THIS MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE TO EVER HAVE PEACE AND CAUSES PERPETUAL WARBen Moretti, Der Standard, February 3rd, 2003.Accessed June 7, 2004, http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0303/msg00099.html

With every new war, it becomes more difficult to argue in favour of peace without being viewed as insane or irresponsible. As a result, aside from killing of people and destroying resources, aside from the suffering generated, wars such as the one which is now being prepared turn the intellectual landscape into a desert. Their unnamed casualties include the intellectual foundations which would make it possible to think of politics as something different from security.

D. SUCH A PROCESS DEVALUES LIFE TO THE POINT OF NON-VALUEGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1998.HOMO SACER:SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE, p.142.

Here it becomes clear how Binding’s attempt to transform euthanasia into a juridico-political concept (“life unworthy of being lived”) touched on a crucial matter. If it is the sovereign who, insofar as he decides on the state of exception, has the power to decide which life may be killed without the commission of homi-cide, in the age of biopolitics this power becomes emancipated from the state of exception and transformed into the power to decide the point at which life ceases to be politically relevant. When life becomes the supreme political value, not only is the problem of life’s nonvalue thereby posed, as Schmitt suggests but further, it is as if the ultimate ground of sovereign power were at stake in this decision.


Agamben K – 1NC Shell 2/2

E.THE ALTERNATIVE IS TO FORM A COMMUNITY BASED ON BROKEN LANGUAGEGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, 2000.MEANS WITHOUT END:NOTE ON POLITICS, p. 85.

Contemporary politics is precisely this devastating experimentum linguae that disarticulates and empties, all over the planet, traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities. Only those who will be able to carry it to completion—without allowing that which reveals to be veiled in the nothingness it reveals, but bringing language itself to language—will become the first citizens of a community with neither presuppositions nor a state. In this community, the nullifying and determining power of what is common will be pacified and the Shekinah will no longer suck the evil milk of its own separateness. Like Rabbi Akiba in the Haggadah of the Talmud, the citizens of this community will enter the paradise of language and will come out of it uninjured.

1. THIS IDEOLOGY CHALLENGES THE NOTION OF A STABLE MIND AND BODYGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, 2000. MEANS WITHOUT END: NOTE ON POLITICS, p. 139.

We have endured such an impotence as best we could while being surrounded on every side by the din of the media, which were defining the new planetary political space in which exception had become the rule. But it is by starting from this uncertain terrain and from this opaque zone of indistinction that today we must once again find the path of another politics, of another body, of another word. I would not feel up to forgoing this indistinction of public and private, of biological body and body politic, of zoe and bios, for any reason whatsoever. It is here that I must find my space once again—here or nowhere else. Only a politics that starts from such an awareness can interest me.

2. THIS IDEOLOGY IS COMPLETELY ENTRENCHED AND CRITIQUE IS ESSENTIAL TO CHALLENGING AND BEGINNING A MOVEMENT AWAY FROM ITGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1998.HOMO SACER: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE, p. 187.

The “body” is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign power. In its extreme form, the biopolitical body of the West (this last incarnation of homo sacer) appears as a threshold of absolute indistinction between law and fact, juridical rule and biological life. In the person of the Fuhrer, bare life passes immediately into law, just as in the person of the camp inhabitant (or the neomort) law becomes indistinguishable -from biological life.


Agamben K – Discourse Key

1. DISCOURSE IS THE WAY WE MUST EVALUATE POLITICAL STRUGGLESGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, 2000.MEANS WITHOUT END: NOTE ON POLITICS, p. 95.

Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics, that is perhaps because animals are always already in the open and do not try to take possession of their own exposition; they simply live in it without caring about it. That is why they are not interested in mirrors, in the image as image. Human beings, on the other hand, separate images from things and give them a name precisely because they want to recognize themselves, that is, they want to take possession of their own very appearance. Human beings thus transform the open into a world, that is, into the battlefield of a political struggle without quarter.

2. EVALUATION MUST INVOLVE FORM-OF-LIFE THAT GUIDE CONCEPTION OF RIGHTSGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, 2000.MEANS WITHOUT END: NOTE ON POLITICS, p. 11-12.

The act of distinguishing between the mere, massive inscription of social knowledge into the productive processes (an inscription that characterizes the contemporary phase of capitalism, the society of the spectacle) and intellectuality as antagonistic power and form-of-life—such an act passes through the expe-rience of this cohesion and this inseparability. Thought is form-of-life, life that cannot be segregated from its form’ and anywhere the intimacy of this inseparable life appears, in the materiality of corporeal processes and of habitual ways of life no less than in theory, there and only there is there thought. And it is this thought, this form-of-life, that, abandoning naked life to “Man” and to the “Citizen,” who lothe it temporarily and represent it with their “rights,” must become the guiding concept and the unitary center of the coming politics.

3. THE STATE OF EXCEPTION EXISTS IN ALL OF OUR LIFESTYLES THE CRITIQUE COMES FIRSTGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1998.HOMO SACER:SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE, p. 57.

One of the paradoxes of the state of exception lies in the fact that in the state of exception, it is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from execution of the law, such that what violates a rule and what conforms to it coincide without any remainder (a person who goes for a walk during the curfew is not transgressing the law any more than the soldier who kills him is executing it). This is precisely the situation that, in the Jewish tradition (and, actually, in every genuine messianic tradition), comes to pass when the Messiah arrives. The first consequence of this arrival is that the Law (according to the Kabbalists, this is the law of the Torah of Beriah, that is, the law in force from the creation of man until the messianic days) is fulfilled and consummated.

4. DISCOURSE AND REPRESENTATIONS ARE ESSENTIAL TO UNDERSTANDING POLITICSGiorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, 2000.MEANS WITHOUT END: NOTE ON POLITICS, p. 93.

State power today is no longer founded on the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence — a monopoly that states share increasingly willingly with other nonsovereign organizations such as the United Nations and terrorist organizations; rather, it is founded above all on the control of appearance (of doxa). The fact that politics constitutes itself as an autonomous sphere goes hand in hand with the separation of the face in the world of spectacle—a world in which human communication is being separated from itself. Exposition thus transforms itself into a value that is accumulated in images and in the media, while a new class of bureaucrats jealously watches over its management.


Agamben K – Link – War on Terror

1. REDUCING POLITICS TO STATE VS. TERRORISM ENSURES TERRORISTIC ACTIVITYGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, May, 2003.THE STATE OF EMERGENCY AS WORLD ORDER:CONCLUSIONS AFTER 11TH OF SEPTEMBER. accessed June 7, 2004, http://www.muslim-lawyers.net/news/index.php3?aktion=show&number=204

By the rapid reduction of global politics to the antitheses of "state/terrorism", what once seemed a paradoxical and peripheral term has today become real and effective. By strategically linking the two paradigms of the state of emergency and the civil war, the new American world order defines itself as a situation in which the state of emergency can no longer be distinguished from the norm, and in which even differentiating between war and peace - and between external and civil war - is impossible. It is this model which must be unconditionally rejected, because from this point of view, state and terrorism in the end form a single system with two faces in which not only does each of the aspects serve to justify the actions of the other, but in fact they become indistinguishable.

2. DISCIPLINARY PROCESSES OF DEMOCRACY LEAD TO BIOPOLITICSGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1998.HOMO SACER: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE, p. 9.

When its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the organization of State power and emancipation from it. Everything happens as if, along with the disciplinary process by which State power makes man as a living being into its own specific object, another process is set in motion that in large measure corresponds to the birth of modern democracy, in which man as a living being presents himself no longer as an object but as the subject of political power. These processes—which in many ways oppose and (at least apparently) bitterly conflict with each other—nevertheless converge insofar as both concern the bare life of the citizen, the new biopolitical body of humanity.

3. THE BAN IS A LIMIT RELATIONSHIP THAT ENSURES BIOPOLITICSGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1998.HOMO SACER: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE, p. 47.

Instead one must think the existence of potentiality without any relation to Being in the form of actuality—not even in the extreme form of the ban and the potentiality not to be, and of actuality as the fulfillment and manifestation of potentiality—and think the existence of potentiality even without any relation to being in the form of the gift of the self and of letting be. This, however, implies nothing less than thinking ontology and politics beyond every figure of relation, beyond even the limit relation that is the sovereign ban. Yet it is this very task that many, today, refuse to assume at any cost.

4. DEMOCRACY RELIES ON DISCIPLINARY VIOLENCE TO EXISTGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1998.HOMO SACER: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE, p. 125.

This is modern democracy’s strength and, at the same time, its inner contradiction: modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in political conflict. And the root of modern democracy’s secret biopolitical calling lies here: [they] body. This ambiguous (or polar) character of democracy appears even more clearly in the habeas corpus if one considers the fact that the same legal procedure that was originally intended to assure the presence of the accused at the trial and, therefore, to keep the accused from avoiding judgment, turns—in its new and definitive form—into grounds for the sheriff to detain and exhibit the body of the accused.


Agamben K – Link – Bare Life

1. A BAN IS A PART OF CREATING SACRED LIFE THAT THE STATE CAN POLICEGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1998.HOMO SACER: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE, p. 111.

In the city, the banishment of sacred life is more internal than every interioity and more external than every extraneousness. The banishment of sacred life is the sovereign nomos that conditions every rule, the originary spatialization that governs and makes possible every localization and every territorialization. And if in modernity life is more and more clearly placed at the center of State politics (which now becomes, in Foucault’s terms, biopolitics), if in our age all citizens can be said, in a specific but extremely real sense, to appear virtually as hominess sacri, this is possible only because the relation of ban has constituted the essential structure of sovereign power from the beginning.

2. CAPITALISM FACILITATES THE STATE OF EXCEPTION AS POLITICAL POWERGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, 2000.MEANS WITHOUT END: NOTE ON POLITICS, p. 133.

Nothing is more nauseating than the impudence with which those who have turned money into their only raison d’etre periodically wave around the scarecrow of economic crisis: the rich nowadays wear plain rags so as to warn the poor that sacrifices will be necessary for everybody. And the docility is just as astonishing; those who have made themselves stolidly complicitous with the imbalance of the public debt, by handing all their savings over to the state in exchange for bonds, now receive the warning blow without batting an eyelash and ready themselves to tighten their belts. And yet those who have any lucidity left in them know that the crisis is always in process and that it constitutes the internal motor of capitalism in its present phase, much as the state of exception is today the normal structure of political power.

3. A STATE OF EXCEPTION LEADS TO THE CREATION OF BARE LIFEGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1998.HOMO SACER: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE, p. 174.

If this is true, if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there and whatever its denomination and specific topography.

4. IRAQ IS THE EMBODIMENT OF REDUCING PEOPLE TO BARE LIFEZach Dochterman, Writer for the Aporia Journal, 2003.AUTONOMOUS THOUGHT ON THE LATEST STATE OF EMERGENCY. THE APORIA JOURNAL. p. 7.

The massacres in Iraq are particularly troubling because they show a break with the old ideal that a country's national sovereignty may be attacked only if it has threatened another country's territorial integrity. Indeed, the purpose of this war, the latent content behind the myths of "disarmament", "weapons of mass destruction" etcÉ is an expansion of the field of command of U.S. sovereignty. In this movement, the "bare life" of citizens from other parts of the globe begin to fall under U.S. sovereignty. Have we seen such a major manuever since the Russian invasion of the Eastern bloc countries? As an attempt to counter the war, various peace activist have thrown their bodies in the midst of Iraq, because the allied coalition cannot view their activists' bodies in exactly the same way as the "bare life" (life that can be killed without retribution or legal punishment) of Iraqi ctizens. Or perhaps they can . . .


Agamben K – Link – Human Rights

HUMAN RIGHTS ARE THE BASIS OF BARE LIFEGiorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, 2000. MEANS WITHOUT END: NOTE ON POLITICS, p. 20-21.

It is time to cease to look at all the declarations of rights from 1789 to the present day as proclamations of eternal metajuridical values aimed at binding the legislator to the respect of such values; It is time, rather, to understand them according to their real function in the modern state. Human rights, in fact, represent first of all the originary figure for the inscription of natural naked life in the political-juridical order of the nation-state. Naked life (the human being), which in antiquity belonged to God and in the classical world was clearly distinct (as zoe) from political life (bios), comes to the forefront in the management of the state and becomes, so to speak, its earthly foundation. Nation-state means a state that makes nativity or birth [nascita] (that is, naked human life) the foundation of its own sovereignty. This is the meaning (and it is not even a hidden one) of the first three articles of the 1789 Declaration: it is only because this declaration inscribed (in articles 1 and 2) the native element in the heart of any political organization that it can firmly bind (in article 3) the principle of sovereignty to the nation (in conformity with its etymon, native [naffo] originally meant simply “birth” [nascita]). The fiction that is implicit here is that birth comes into being im-mediately as nation, so that there may not be any difference between the two moments. Rights, in other words, are attributed to the human being only to the degree to which he or she is the immediately vanishing presupposition (and, in fact, the presupposition that must never come to light as such) of the citizen.

WE MUST RETHINK THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RIGHTS AND BIOPOLITICSJacques Ranciere, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, Spring/Summer 2004. SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY, Vol. 103, No. 2/3, p. 302.

If we want to get out of this ontological trap, we have to reset the question of the Rights of Man—more precisely, the question of their subject—which is the subject of politics as well. This means setting the question of what politics is on a different footing. In order to do this, let us have a closer look at the Arendtian argument about the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, an argument that Agamben basically endorses. She makes them a quandary, which can be put as follows: either the rights of the citizen are the rights of man—but the rights of man are the rights of the unpoliticized person; they are the rights of those who have no rights, which amounts to nothing—or the rights of man are the rights of the citizen, the rights attached to the fact of being a citizen of such or such constitutional state. This means that they are the rights of those who have rights, which amounts to a tautology.11 Either the rights of those who have no rights or the rights of those who have rights. Either a void or a tautology, and, in both cases, a deceptive trick, such is the lock that she builds. It works out only at the cost of sweeping aside the third assumption that would escape the quandary. There is indeed a third assumption, which I would put as follows: the Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not.

RIGHTS GIVEN BY THE STATE DIRECTLY CONSTITUTE INDIVIDUALS AS HOMO SACERAnne Caldwell, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville, 2004.THEORY & EVENT, Volume 7, Issue 2, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html

This expansion of the range of life meriting protection does not limit sovereignty, but provides sites for its expansion. In recent decades, factors that once might have been indifferent to sovereignty become a field for its exercise. Attributes such as national status, economic status, color, race, sex, religion, geo-political position have become the subjects of rights declarations. From a liberal or cosmopolitan perspective, such enumerations expand the range of life protected from and serving as a limit upon sovereignty. Agamben's analysis suggests the contrary. If indeed sovereignty is bio-political before it is juridical, then juridical rights come into being only where life is incorporated within the field of bio-sovereignty. The language of rights, in other words, calls up and depends upon the life caught within sovereignty: homo sacer.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_atlantic_quarterly/v103/#FOOT11


Agamben K – Link – Citizenship

BARE LIFE RELIES ON THE DIVIDE BETWEEN POLITICAL AND NON-POLITICAL LIFEAnne Caldwell, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville, 2004.THEORY & EVENT, Volume 7, Issue 2, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html

Although homo sacer is the figure who will "unveil" the mysteries of sovereignty (p.8), Agamben's account of sovereignty is equally indebted to Greek thought. As Agamben reports, something of homo sacer appears in Aristotle's distinction between zoe as the natural life shared by all animals, and bios as a specific political way of life. The good life of the polis emerges from a distinction between natural and political life, and their integration into the exception. What at first appears an opposition between natural life and political life is rather an implication "of bare life in politically qualified life" (p. 7), political life is defined by the exception of natural life. Agamben here treats zoe (natural life) as bare life or homo sacer. That usage is strange. He finds a Roman category in a Greek world that would not have known it, and appears to treat bare life as identical to natural life.10 Despite periodic uses of bare life and zoe interchangeably, their distinction is essential to his argument. Bare life is distinct from natural life because its precarious status is due to its capture by sovereign power. As Agamben explains, homo sacer is "the hinge on which each sphere [zoe and bios] is articulated at the threshold at which the two spheres are joined in becoming indeterminate. Neither political bios nor natural zoe, sacred life is the zone of indistinction in which zoe and bios constitute each other in including and excluding each other (p. 90). Like sovereignty, homo sacer is a creature of the limit; it belongs to the zone of indeterminacy generated by sovereignty. 11 Homo sacer, regardless of whether it lives a life of happiness or misery, is defined by its dependence upon sovereign power for its status. This nexus, in which sovereignty emerges by capturing life in the exception, defines the nature of political belonging in the West. The terminology we are familiar with from modernity, especially of contract and rights, are, on this analysis, secondary phenomena.

REFUGEE CRISES DEMONSTRATE THAT CITIZENSHIP IN MODERN NATION-STATES IS BIOPOLITICAL BY NATUREAnne Caldwell, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville, 2004.THEORY & EVENT, Volume 7, Issue 2, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html

Those refugees, whom Agamben identifies as figures of homo sacer, are the focus of his account of the inter-war crises. The lessons he derives from the refugee, however, are directed toward domestic nation-state citizenship. Precisely because refugees and denaturalized citizens were abandoned by the European states, the refugee forced into open " the difference between birth and nation." In doing so, the refugee "causes the secret presupposition of the political domain -- bare life -- to appear for an instant within that domain" (Agamben 1998: 131). The European states, refusing to recognize refugees, revealed that national citizenship has never really been defined by political categories, but by sheer birth into a nation. What the refugee reveals is the oscillation between natural and political life within the nation-state. Modern citizenship, defined by seventeenth century thinkers as based in natural equality, now appears as neither simply natural, nor political. The ground of citizenship is rather the life formed by the mixture of the natural and the political: homo sacer.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/#FOOT11

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/#FOOT10


Agamben K – Alternative – Universal Community

1. FINDING A UNIVERSAL HUMAN INABILITY TO COMMUNICATE LEADS TO UNIVERSALISMGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, 2000.MEANS WITHOUT END: NOTE ON POLITICS, p. 84-85.

This is why today power founded on a presupposed foundation is vacillating all around the planet: the kingdoms of the Earth are setting out, one after the other, for the spectacular-democratic regime that constitutes the completion of the state-form. Even more than economic necessities and technological development, what drives the nations of the Earth toward a single common destiny is the alienation of lin-guistic being, the uprooting of all peoples from their vital dwelling in language. But exactly for this reason, the age in which we live is also that in which for the first time it becomes possible for human beings to experience their own linguistic essence—to experience, that is, not some language content or some true proposition, but language itself as well as the very fact of speaking.

2. EXPOSING THE WEAKNESS OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION CAN CREATE NEW COMMUNITYGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, 2000.MEANS WITHOUT END: NOTE ON POLITICS, p. 91-92.

All living beings are in the open: they manifest themselves and shine in their appearance. But only human beings want to take possession of this opening, to seize hold of their own appearance and of their own being-manifest. Language is this appropriation, which transforms nature into face. This is why appearances becomes a problem for human beings: it becomes the location of a struggle for truth. The face is at once the irreparable being-exposed of humans and the very opening in which thy hide and stay hidden. The face is the only location of community, the only possible city. And that is because that which in single individuals opens up to the political is the tragicomedy of truth, in which they always already fall and out of which they have to find a way.

3. THIS LEADS TO A HUMAN COMMUNITY WITHOUT PRESUPPOSITIONGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at University of Verona, 1999.POTENTIALITIES: COLLECTED ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY, p. 47.

There can be no true human community on the basis of a presupposition—be it a nation, a language, or even the a priori of communication of which hermeneutics speaks. What unites human beings among them-selves is not a nature, a voice, or a common imprisonment in signifying language; it is the vision of language itself and, therefore, the experience of language’s limits, its end. A true community can only be a community that is not presupposed. Pure philosophical presentation, therefore, cannot merely be the presentation of ideas about language or the world; instead, it must above all be the presentation of the Idea of language.

4. CREATING HUMAN COMMUNITY WITHOUT PRESUPPOSITION SOLVES DISGRACEGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at University of Verona, 1999.POTENTIALITIES: COLLECTED ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY, p. 143.

What momentarily shines through these laconic statements are not the biographical events of personal his-tories, as suggested by the pathos-laden emphasis of a certain oral history, but rather the luminous trail of a different history. What suddenly comes to light is not the memory of an oppressed existence, but the silent flame of an immemorable ithos — not the subject’s face, hut rather the disjunction between the living being and the speaking being that marks its empty place. Here life subsists only in the infamy in which it existed; here a name lives solely in the disgrace that covered it. And something in this disgrace bears witness to life beyond all biography.


Agamben K – Alternative – Incomplete Identity

1. ONLY INCOMPLETE IDENTITY CAN BEGIN TO COMMUNICATE THE INCOMMUNABLEGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1993.THE COMING COMMUNITY: THEORY OUT OF BOUNDS VOLUME 1, p. 64-65.

Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity—if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable. Selecting in the new planetary humanity those characteristics that allow for its survival, removing the thin diaphragm that separates bad mediatized advertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates only itself— this is the political task of our generation.

2. BY PLAYING WITH LANGUAGE WE CAN RUPTURE BIOPOLITICSGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at University of Verona, 1999.POTENTIALITIES: COLLECTED ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY, p. 20.

The passage from potentiality to act, from language to the word, from the common to the proper, comes about every time as a shuttling in both directions along a line of sparkling alternation on which common nature and singularity, potentiality and act change roles and interpenetrate. The being that is engendered on this line is whatever being, and the manner in which it passes from the common to the proper and from the proper to the common is called usage—or rather, ethos.

3. QUESTIONING ATROCITY CAN BEGIN TO ALTER BIOPOLITICSGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, 2000.MEANS WITHOUT END: NOTE ON POLITICS, p. 41.

The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which polities becomes biopolitics and the homo sacer becomes indistinguishable from the citizen. The correct question regarding the horrors committed in the camps, therefore, is not the question that asks hypocritically how it could have been possible to commit such atrocious horrors against other human beings; it would be more honest, and above all more useful, to investigate carefully how—that is, thanks to what juridical procedures and political devices—human beings could have been so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime (at this point, in fact, truly anything had become possible).

4. LANGUAGE PROVIDES A PLACE TO CREATE NEW SUBJECTIVITYGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1998.HOMO SACER: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE, p.146.

But the relation between language and its existence, between langue and the archive, demands subjectivity as that which, in its very possibility of speech, bears witness to an impossibility of speech. This is why subjectivity appears as witness; this is why it can speak for those who cannot speak. Testimony is a potentiality that becomes actual through an impotentiality of speech; it is, moreover, an impossibility that gives itself existence through a possibility of speaking. These two movements cannot be identified either with a subject or with a consciousness; yet they cannot be divided into two incommunicable substances. Their inseparable intimacy is testimony.


Agamben K – Alternative – Incomplete Identity

THE ALTERNATIVE IS TO AFFIRM A NOTION OF COMMUNITY THAT DECLINES ANY RECOGNIZABLE IDENTITY – THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO RUPTURE BIOPOLITICSLeland Deladurantaye, doctoral candidate in English at Cornell University, Summer 2000. DIACRITICS, Vol. 30, No. 2, p. 10-11.

To understand the nature and importance of this displacement effected in Agamben’s theory of language, we need to note a term that plays a crucial role therein: community. An ethics, a doctrine aiming at the realization of the happy life, must of necessity consider how people might live together, how they might live in a community. To this end it must consider what it is that might form or found a group, a community, what these men and women might have in common. For Agamben, modern politics has done nothing so much as tirelessly demonstrate that no true community can be founded on a presupposition or condition of belonging of any kind (be it in the form of nation, race, class, or gender); such a true commonality can in no way be understood after the manner of an attribute or a substance, can in no way be founded on the structure of presupposition.12 This is an aporia that Agamben is far from the only one facing today (the dialogue between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy to which Agamben’s The Coming Community is to a certain degree a response is perhaps the most salient one in this instance); it is his euporia which is unique. One must confront then the fact that the only means by which an authentic human community could be constituted would be on the basis of what Agamben refers to in an essay from this volume as “the unpresupposable and unpresupposed principle . . . that, as such, constitutes authentic human community and communication” [P 35]. And, as this same essay notes, it is, for Agamben, finally an experience of “a pure event of language before or beyond all possible meaning” which provides the means for encountering this “unpresupposable and unpresupposed principle” —that is to say, just this force of expropriation we encountered earlier [P 42]. Agamben’s analysis (in this sense, identical to de Man’s) devastates the ground of presupposition. What one is left with after such an experience or experiment is a vision of language no longer grounded upon a constantly displaced presupposition (the violence of which is the violence of language). The matter of language, exposing the groundless presupposition of language, offers an experience of, an experiment in, a belonging that is without presupposition—“the unpresupposable and unpresupposed principle” of which Agamben speaks, and which he calls in one of the essays from this volume “pure destination” [P 113]. It is for this reason that Agamben states that only because man finds himself cast into language without the vehicle of a voice, and only because the experimentum linguae lures him, grammarless, into that void and that aphonia, do an ethos and a community of any kind become possible. So the community that is born of the experimentum linguae cannot take the form of a presupposition, not even in the purely “grammatical” form of a self-presupposition. . . . The first outcome of the experimentum linguae, therefore, is a radical revision of the very idea of Community. [IH 9]


Agamben K – Alternative – Whatever-Being

1. BIOPOLITICAL VIOLENCE IS NOT INEVITABLE; WE MUST AFFIRM NON-IDENTIFIABLE BEING AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO BIOPOLITICSAnne Caldwell, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville, 2004. THEORY & EVENT, Volume 7, Issue 2, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html

Can we imagine another form of humanity, and another form of power? The bio-sovereignty described by Agamben is so fluid as to appear irresistible. Yet Agamben never suggests this order is necessary. Bio-sovereignty results from a particular and contingent history, and it requires certain conditions. Sovereign power, as Agamben describes it, finds its grounds in specific coordinates of life, which it then places in a relation of indeterminacy. What defies sovereign power is a life that cannot be reduced to those determinations: a life "that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life. " (2.3). In his earlier Coming Community, Agamben describes this alternative life as "whatever being." More recently he has used the term "forms-of-life." These concepts come from the figure Benjamin proposed as a counter to homo sacer: the "total condition that is 'man'." For Benjamin and Agamben, mere life is the life which unites law and life. That tie permits law, in its endless cycle of violence, to reduce life an instrument of its own power. The total condition that is man refers to an alternative life incapable of serving as the ground of law. Such a life would exist outside sovereignty. Agamben's own concept of whatever being is extraordinarily dense. It is made up of varied concepts, including language and potentiality; it is also shaped by several particular dense thinkers, including Benjamin and Heidegger. What follows is only a brief consideration of whatever being, in its relation to sovereign power.

2. WHATEVER-BEING IS ALL AROUND US; THE VERY ACT OF VOTING NEGATIVE ENACTS A WORLD APART FROM BIOPOLITICAL CONTROL AND VIOLENCEAnne Caldwell, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville, 2004. THEORY & EVENT, Volume 7, Issue 2, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html

We should pay attention to this comparison. For what Agamben suggests is that whatever being is not any abstract, inaccessible life, perhaps promised to us in the future. Whatever being, should we care to see it, is all around us, wherever we reject the criteria sovereign power would use to classify and value life. "In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity -- even that of a State identity within the State . . . What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without a representable condition of belonging" (Agamben 1993:85.6). At every point where we refuse the distinctions sovereignty and the state would demand of us, the possibility of a non-state world, made up of whatever life, appears.

3. COMMUNITIES THAT DECLINE IDENTITY RUPTURE THE BASIS OF STATE CONTROLAnne Caldwell, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville, 2004. THEORY & EVENT, Volume 7, Issue 2, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html

Indifferent to any distinction between a ground and added determinations of its essence, whatever being cannot be grasped by a power built upon the separation of a common natural life, and its political specification. Whatever being dissolves the material ground of the sovereign exception and cancels its terms. This form of life is less post-metaphysical or anti-sovereign, than a-metaphysical and a-sovereign. Whatever is indifferent not because its status does not matter, but because it has no particular attribute which gives it more value than another whatever being. As Agamben suggests, whatever being is akin to Heidegger's Dasein. Dasein, as Heidegger describes it, is that life which always has its own being as its concern -- regardless of the way any other power might determine its status. Whatever being, in the manner of Dasein, takes the form of an "indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to isolate something like a bare life. In the state of exception become the rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of


sovereign power, turns into existence over which power no longer seems to have any hold" (Agamben 1998: 153).


Agamben K – A2: Permutation

1. NO COMBINATION OF THESE POLITICS IS POSSIBLEGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, 2000.MEANS WITHOUT END: NOTE ON POLITICS, p. 113.

Sovereignty, therefore, is the guardian who prevents the undecidable threshold between violence and right, nature and language, from coming to light. We have to fix our gaze, instead, precisely on what the statue of Justice (which, as Montesquieu reminds us, was to be state of exception) was not supposed to see, namely, what nowadays is apparent to everybody: that the state of exception is the rule, that naked life is immediately the carrier of the sovereign nexus, and that, as such, it is today abandoned to a kind of violence that is all the more effective for being anonymous and quotidian. If there is today a social power [potenza], it must see its own impotence [impotenza] through to the end, it must decline any will to either posit or preserve right, it must break everywhere the nexus between violence and right, between the living and language that constitutes sovereignty.

2. WE MUST TOTALLY RETHINK BIOPOLITICS WITHOUT ANY OF THEIR JUSTIFICATIONSGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1998.HOMO SACER: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE, p. 11.

The biopolitics of both modern totalitarianism and the society of mass hedonism and consumerism certainly constitute answers to these questions. Nevertheless, until a completely new politics—that is, a politics no longer founded on the exception of bare life—is at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the “beautiful day” of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it.

3. THERE IS NO WAY THESE POSITIONS CAN BE COMBINEDGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1998.HOMO SACER: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE, p. 188.

If we give the name form-of-life to this being that is only its own bare existence and to this life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it, we will witness the emergence of a field of research beyond the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and jurisprudence. First, however, it will be necessary to examine how it was possible for something like a bare life to be conceived within these disciplines, and how the historical development of these very disciplines has brought them to a limit beyond which they cannot venture without risking an unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe.

4. WE MUST ENTIRELY RETHINK BIOPOLITICS BEFORE TAKING ACTIONGiorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1998.HOMO SACER: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE, p. 187.

Today a law that seeks to transform itself wholly into life is more and more confronted with a life that has been deadened and mortified into juridical rule. Every attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with the clear awareness that we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoe and bios, between private life and political existence, between man as a simple living being at home in the house and man’s political existence in the city.


A2: Agamben K – Alternative Fails – Weakens Resistance

1. AGAMBEN’S POSITION LEAVES EVERYONE POWERLESSMichael Hardt, Professor of Literature at Duke University, 2000.THEORY AND EVENT, volume 4, p.3.

Agamben uses the term "naked life" to name that limit of humanity, the bare minimum of existence that is exposed in the concentration camp. In the final analysis, he explains, modern sovereignty rules over naked life and biopower is this power to rule over life itself. What results from this analysis is not so much passivity, I would say, but powerlessness. There is no figure that can challenge and contest sovereignty.

2. AGAMBENS NOTION OF BIOPOWER PROVIDES NO ROOM FOR RESISTANCEMichael Hardt, Professor of Literature at Duke University, 2000.THEORY AND EVENT, volume 4, p.3.

Our critique of Agamben's (and also Foucault's) notion of biopower is that it is conceived only from above and we attempt to formulate instead a notion of biopower from below, that is, a power by which the multitude itself rules over life. (In this sense, the notion of biopower one finds in some veins of ecofeminism such as the work of Vandana Shiva, although cast on a very different register, is closer to our notion of a biopower from below.) What we are interested in finally is a new biopolitics that reveals the struggles over forms of life.

3. AGAMBEN PRESUMES A CONVERSATION ON THE BASIS OF FAILED LANGUAGE IS POSSIBLE – THIS DOOMS HIS PROJECTJohn Beverley, Professor of Cultural Studies at Pittsburgh University, 1999.SUBALTERNITY AND REPRESENTATION: ARGUMENTS IN CRITICAL THEORY, p. 40.

The desire for solidarity must begin, however, with a relation of what Gutierrez calls "concrete friendship with the poor": it cannot be simply a matter of taking thought or "conversation," or for that matter of romanticizing or idealizing the subaltern. In that sense, Mallon may have a point about the limits of textuality" and the virtues of fieldwork. Moreover, in making the shift from "objectivity" to "solidarity," we cannot simply disavow representation under the pretext that we are allowing the subaltern to "speak for itself" (that is Spivak's main point in "Can the Subaltern Speak?"). And there is a way in which the (necessarily?) liberal political slant Rorty gives the idea of solidarity may also be, as the 1960s slogan has it, part of the problem rather than part of the solution, because it assumes that "conversation" is possible across power/exploitation divides that radically differentiate the participants."


A2: Agamben K – Alternative Fails – Disables Universalism

1. AGAMBEN PROVIDES NO BASIS FOR UNIVERSAL APPEAL – HIS ACTIVISM FAILSJoseph Wagner, Professor at Colgate, May 2, 2000.THE REVOLT AGAINST REASON: MISTAKEN ASSUMPTIONS IN POST-POSITIVIST RELATIVISM. Accessed June 7, 2004. http://hascall.colgate.edu/jwagner/DownloadFiles/Revolt.doc

If the subordinate groups have one set of values and the dominant groups have another; if the subordinate groups have their fleeting images and the dominant groups have another; if the subordinate group has its collective memories and the dominant group theirs, then the question of politics and morals is, which values and images should rule? If subordinate groups find objectivity hostile, then they deny a common ground that is prior to or takes precedence over the parochial differences in beliefs and values. If they can only appeal to that which is unique in their group, if they can appeal to values that move only them, then they fail.

2. ONLY APPEALING TO DOMINANT VALUES CAN WORK – THE CRITIQUE REJECTS THEMJoseph Wagner, Professor at Colgate, May 2, 2000.THE REVOLT AGAINST REASON: MISTAKEN ASSUMPTIONS IN POST-POSITIVIST RELATIVISM. Accessed June 7, 2004. http://hascall.colgate.edu/jwagner/DownloadFiles/Revolt.doc

They fail to appeal to the values of the dominant group; they fail to make any claim upon the dominant group; and thereby concede to a struggle that is simply a matter of power. Unfortunately, the dominant group, by definition has power. Thus the normative prescriptions of relativism are practically as well as logically self-defeating. Alternatively, objective principles of justice and mutual respect make moral and political claims which ought to be honored by all persons, nations, and cultures. These are universal claims, the only sorts of claims which assert obligation on those who are dominant as well as those who are subordinate.

3. ONLY UNIVERSAL VALUE TO LIFE CAN BE SEEN AS AN IMPACT THE NEGATIVE FAILSJoseph Wagner, Professor at Colgate, May 2, 2000.THE REVOLT AGAINST REASON: MISTAKEN ASSUMPTIONS IN POST-POSITIVIST RELATIVISM. Accessed June 7, 2004. http://hascall.colgate.edu/jwagner/DownloadFiles/Revolt.doc

Only universal claims of justice are the kind that cannot be discharged by the rejoinder, 'those are simply your tastes and preferences, not mine,' because only universal claims are grounded on the fundamental commonality of human beings and human societies, not upon the ineradicable differences between them. Such universality resides in the common reason and common truths (empirical and moral), which make differences possible as well as shared understanding and appreciation. Finally, identifying, understanding and appreciating differences between groups and individuals depends the universal capacity for logical consistency and objectivity that every language user possesses.

4. ONLY BY REGISTERING HAPPINESS AND PAIN CAN CHANGE BE MADE AGAMBEN IGNORES THESE TOOLS FOR UNIVERSALISMJoseph Wagner, Professor at Colgate, May 2, 2000.THE REVOLT AGAINST REASON: MISTAKEN ASSUMPTIONS IN POST-POSITIVIST RELATIVISM. Accessed June 7, 2004. http://hascall.colgate.edu/jwagner/DownloadFiles/Revolt.doc

By this means I recognize that 'happiness,' 'pain,' 'frustration,' 'friendship,' 'commitments' and 'beliefs about justice' matter not only to me but to others. I recognize that 'happiness' is desirable not because it occurs in me, but because happiness is a desirable experience in whomever it occurs. I recognize that if these matters are reasons to advance my interests or the interests of my society, they are also reasons to advance the interests of others and other societies. It is our commonality and universality that forms the basis for understanding and solidarity. Abandoning the common and the universal, as post-positivists, post-structuralists, and post-moderns do, not only rests upon a series of epistemic mistakes, but leads to a moral and political program that is as foolish as it is imprudent and unwise.


A2: Agamben K – Alternative Fails – Dooms Activism

1. AGAMBEN DISABLES THE CONTROL OF ONE’S OWN BODYRichard Mohr, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana, 1997.BEST OF THE HARVARD GAY AND LESBIAN REVIEW, ed. Schneider, p 339.

In postmodernism, there cannot even be a sense of privacy that emanates from and guarantees a person’s control of his or her own body. In the postmodern view, the body is not a constitutive factor in the individual, but is at most a blank slate over which the gas-cloud-like social mind drifts and writes its script, which the individual then reads off to find out what type of person she is. The body as a principle of uniqueness, as a determinate source of desire, as a receptacle of pleasure, and as an essential instrumentality of freedom—all this is denied by postmodernism.

2. AGAMBEN MAKES EVERYTHING SOCIAL AND LEAVES OUT THE PERSONALRichard Mohr, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana, 1997.BEST OF THE HARVARD GAY AND LESBIAN REVIEW, ed. Schneider, p 338.

Indeed it is chiefly through the social causing the self to perceive itself as a certain type (say, homosexual) that the self becomes the type and comes to have desires in accordance with it (say, homosexual ones). And so, the second prong of personhood, call it autonomy—the ability to critically assess and revise one’s ends—is also beyond the horizon of possibility for the socially constructed individual. Further, there is no, and can be no, privacy in the sense of the personal— a region of activity in which a person, simply as a person, is sovereign in her decisions and in her ability to act on them.

3. AGAMBEN MAKES RIGHTS CLAIMS USELESS AND HAS NO ACTIVISMRichard Mohr, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana, 1997.BEST OF THE HARVARD GAY AND LESBIAN REVIEW, ed. Schneider, p 339.

Foucault himself saw that once the individual is dissolved as a source of independent desire and autonomy, appeals to rights are pointless against the ever more ramified and sinuously intrusive state. Rather, at the end of Discipline and Punish, Foucault feebly supposes that micro-level resistances to the state will somehow automatically spring up from within the very webs of power laid out by the state. This assumption seems to be little more than a pledge taken to the Hegelian dogma that theses always contain within themselves antitheses that spring up automatically from them.

4. AGAMBEN ANNIHILATES THE CONCEPT OF FREE SPEECH AND DOOMS ACTIVISMRichard Mohr, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana, 1997.BEST OF THE HARVARD GAY AND LESBIAN REVIEW, ed. Schneider, p 342.

But most postmoderns have not embraced free speech rights. Ruthann Robson, for example, guts the First Amendment in one sentence: “The First Amendment is a rule of law with its roots in European liberal individualism and property-based notions. Its value to lesbians must be decided by us, not assumed by us.” Free speech rights are good only if they “assist us”—that is, us lesbians. This stance, holding that asserted rights really are rights only when the asserting group says they are, does away with free-speech rights altogether once some other competing and winning group makes the same claim for itself: “we believe in free-speech rights only when they work for us, and we’ve won, so no speech rights for you.” In short, majorities, on this account, get to determine what rights there are—which is to say the “rights” are not rights at all, but majority privileges.


A2: Agamben K – Alternative Fails – No Coming Community

1. AGAMBEN’S COMING COMMUNITY CAN NEVER BE ACHIEVEDJean-Philippe Deranty, professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, 2004. BORDERLANDS E-JOURNAL, Vol. 3, No. 1, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm

The description of the radical politics that emerges from the ontology of pure potentiality can be found in The Coming Community, and it is here that the full consequences of Agamben’s problematic interpretation and reappropriation of Benjamin, Heidegger, Schmitt and Arendt become apparent. 45. In the notes that Benjamin was writing in preparation for his Theses on the philosophy of history, one reads: "The messianic world is the world of overall and integral actuality" (Benjamin 1991e: 1235). The last expression is a self-reference to the 1929 essay on surrealism (1991d: 309, [1929]). Against Benjamin’s explicit equation of the "real state of exception" (the state of liberated humanity), with actuality, Agamben’s coming community is a community of subjects that exist only as negative potentialities (actualities that are the possibility of not-being, actualisations of potentiality), the "whatever singularities". Because he has severed the concept of the community from all normative ties, and has rejected all conceptual and normative distinctions (between state of nature and civil state, law and violence, nomos and physis, normal state and exception, etc.), this community-to-come can only be ever described negatively, as beyond all forms of community, and accessed only in the flight from all present and all immanence. It is difficult to avoid thinking that the assumed messianism of this radical politics is only a form of negative theology. Difficult not to think, also, that politics constructed as the "gigantomachy" (Agamben 2003: chapter 4) of an onto-theology of power does not lead to the evanescence of politics.

2. AGAMBEN HAS NO REPLACEMENT FOR THE CONCEPTS HE REJECTSFrances Daly, research fellow in Philosophy at Australian National University, 2004. BORDERLANDS E-JOURNAL, Vol. 3, No. 1, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm

Agamben's questioning of categories frequently creates worthwhile spaces in which challenges to political forms can be made. For example, he uses Alice Becker-Ho's argument concerning the origins of the Romany peoples to usefully call into question what we take to be a 'people' or a 'language'. Becker-Ho contends that the Romany are the "dangerous classes of an earlier epoch" who adopted the patronymics of the countries through which they travelled, rather than people of Eygptian or other origins, and this insight enables Agamben to argue that "all peoples are gangs and coquilles, all languages are jargons and argot" (Agamben, 2000: 67). Likewise, there are many good reasons for placing the refugee at the centre of a contemporary analysis of community – for instance, as a politicizing gambit, as the rejection of an ethics based on autonomy or individualism rather than a heteronomy, as a critique of a particular understanding of nationalism or because of the difficulty in drawing distinctions between State and non-State, even as the basis for a critique of the idea of cosmopolitanism and notions of world citizenship. But rather than pursuing these issues and their relationship to rights, what tends to emerge is a more limited account of the problem of law by way of a rejection of the concepts constituting human rights, including the ideas of humanity, the human, law and history. And, in a surprisingly unimaginative continuation of much preceding criticism of the law, Agamben draws the necessity of such a rejection from a disjuncture between the presuppositions of rights and the reality of their failed or insufficient enactment.

3. AGAMBEN HAS NO THEORY OF POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITYJacques Ranciere, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, Spring/Summer 2004. SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY, Vol. 103, No. 2/3, p. 305.

Agamben' s argument is in line with the classical opposition between the illusion of sovereignty and its real content. As a result, he misses the logic of political subjectivization. Political subjects are surplus subjects. They inscribe the count of the uncounted as a supplement. Politics does not separate a specific sphere of political life from the other spheres. It separates the whole of the community from itself. It opposes two counts of counting it. You can count the community as the sum of its parts—of its groups and of the


qualifications that each of them bears. I call this way of counting police. You can count a supplement to the sum, a part of those who have no part, which separates the community from its parts, places, functions, and qualifications. This is politics, which is not a sphere but a process.


A2: Agamben K – Permutation Solves

1. WE SHOULD STRIVE FOR EMANCIPATION WITHIN MODERNITY WHILE CRITIQUING ITJean-Philippe Deranty, professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, 2004.BORDERLANDS E-JOURNAL, Vol. 3, No. 1, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm

If, with Rancière, we define politics not through the institution of sovereignty, but as a continual struggle for the recognition of basic equality, and thereby strongly distinguish politics from the police order viewed as the functional management of communities (Rancière 1999), then it is possible to acknowledge the normative break introduced by the democratic revolutions of the modern age without falling into a one-sided view of modernity as a neat process of rationalisation. What should be stressed about modernity is not primarily the list of substantive inalienable and imprescriptible human rights, but the equal entitlement of all to claim any rights at all. This definition of politics must be accompanied by the parallel acknowledgment that the times that saw the recognition of the fundamental equality of all also produced the total negation of this principle. But this parallel claim does not necessarily render the first invalid. Rather it points to a tension inherent in modern communities, between the political demands of equality and the systemic tendencies that structurally produce stigmatisation and exclusion.

2. WE CAN ACKNOWLEDGE THE CRITIQUE OF BIOPOLITICS WITHOUT ABANDONING POLITICS ALTOGETHERJean-Philippe Deranty, professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, 2004.BORDERLANDS E-JOURNAL, Vol. 3, No. 1, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm

One can acknowledge the descriptive appeal of the biopower hypothesis without renouncing the antagonistic definition of politics. As Rancière remarks, Foucault’s late hypothesis is more about power than it is about politics (Rancière 2002). This is quite clear in the 1976 lectures (Society must be defended) where the term that is mostly used is that of "biopower". As Rancière suggests, when the "biopower" hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of politics becomes problematic. There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics that is not disjunctive. The power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply because the exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power includes by excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that Foucault was developing in his last writings, in his definition of freedom as "agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228): "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The hierarchical, exclusionary essence of social structures demands as a condition of its possibility an equivalent implicit recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion. It is on the basis of this recognition that politics can sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to exclusion.

3. THOUGH RIGHTS CANNOT BE TAKEN FOR GRANTED, WE MUST NOT ABANDON THEMJean-Philippe Deranty, professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, 2004.BORDERLANDS E-JOURNAL, Vol. 3, No. 1, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm

This ontology enables us also to rethink the relationship of modern subjects to rights. Modern subjects are able to consider themselves autonomous subjects because legal recognition signals to them that they are recognised as full members of the community, endowed with the full capacity to judge. This account of rights in modernity is precious because it provides an adequate framework to understand real political struggles, as fights for rights. We can see now how this account needs to be complemented by the notion of contingency that undermines the apparent necessity of the progress of modernity. Modern subjects know that their rights are granted only contingently, that the possibility of the impossible is always actual. This is why rights should not be taken for granted. But this does not imply that they should be rejected as illusion, on the grounds that they were disclosed as contingent in the horrors of the 20th century. Instead, their contingency should be the reason for constant political vigilance.



A2: Agamben K – State Good

1. THE STATE IS NECESSARY TO ACHIEVE SHORT TERM GOALSNoam Chomsky, Professor of linguistics at MIT, May 15, 1997.CANADIAN DIMENSION.

My short-term goals are to defend and even strengthen elements of state authority which, though illegitimate in fundamental ways, are critically necessary right now to impede the dedicated efforts to 'roll back' the progress that has been achieved in extending democracy and human rights. State authority is now under severe attack in the more democratic societies, but not because it conflicts with the libertarian vision. Rather the opposite: because if offers (weak) protection to some aspects of that vision.

2. THE STATE SHOULD BE USED TO MAXIMIZE THE MOVEMENTS POTENTIALNoam Chomsky, Professor of linguistics at MIT, May 15, 1997.CANADIAN DIMENSION.

In today's world, I think, the goals of a committed anarchist should be to defend some state institutions from the attack against them, while trying at the same time to pry them open to more meaningful public participation - and ultimately, to dismantle them in a much more free society; if the appropriate circumstances can be achieved.

3. AGAMBEN’S ANALYSIS IS TOO RELATIVIST TO CONDEMN THE NAZISRichard Mohr, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana, 1997.BEST OF THE HARVARD GAY AND LESBIAN REVIEW, ed. Schneider, p 341.

Due to its relativistic commitments, postmodernism can never provide this presumption. If a society thinks, in the manner of the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, that slavery is acceptable because blacks are lesser beings, and if values are all socially and historically specific—all culture-bound and culturally determined as postmoderns claim—then there is no fulcrum and lever with which one could dislodge this belief about blacks by showing it to be false. But then, if blacks are inferior, they are not treated worse than they should be when they are treated as slaves rather than as full persons. We can tell from within a culture (say, from its jokes and slang) that some group is humiliated, held in contempt; but without culturally neutral values, one cannot tell whether that group does or does not indeed deserve that contempt.

4. AGAMBEN’S ANALYSIS DISABLES HIM FROM CHALLENGING NAZISMRichard Mohr, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana, 1997.BEST OF THE HARVARD GAY AND LESBIAN REVIEW, ed. Schneider, p 342.

Postmodern theorists like Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble, brand as fascist any appeal to culturally neutral values and the metaphysics such values inevitably entail. But without such values we are unable to tell when ill treatment and ill-will are warranted and when they constitute oppression. The moral relativism of postmoderns leaves them unable even to refute Nazi views on homosexuals: Himmler recounted to his SS generals the ancient Germanic mode of execution for homosexuals—drowning in bogs—and added: “That was no punishment, merely the extinction of an abnormal life. It had to be removed just as we now pull up stinging nettles, toss them on a heap and burn them” (from James Steakley’s 1975 The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany). The moral relativism of the postmoderns destroys the very foundations of the sort of equality which they want to espouse.


A2: Agamben K – Human Rights Good

1. AGAMBEN IS TOO QUICK TO REJECT MODERN THEORIES OF RIGHTSJean-Philippe Deranty, professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, 2004. BORDERLANDS E-JOURNAL, Vol. 3, No. 1, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm

The question, though, is whether Agamben’s counter-theory that results from this critical inspiration is itself valid. This paper aims to assess some of Agamben’s key arguments against normative theories of rights, to show that his own proposal is itself caught up in major conceptual and political difficulties. This leads to the conclusion - which can only be programmatically sketched within the scope of this short paper - that there is still a need to attempt to retrieve the force of Agamben’s critical arguments, but without abandoning the resource that modern rights, in their normative dimensions, can provide for an alternative political theory and practice.

2. AGAMBEN’S REJECTION OF RIGHTS MAKES UNDERSTANDING HISTORICAL STRUGGLES IMPOSSIBLE AND DOOMS FUTURE PROSPECTS FOR RESISTANCEJean-Philippe Deranty, professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, 2004. BORDERLANDS E-JOURNAL, Vol. 3, No. 1, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm

In the case of empirical examples, the erasure of difference between phenomena seems particularly counter-intuitive in the case of dissimilar modes of internment. From a practical point of view, it seems counter-productive to claim that there is no substantial difference between archaic communities and modern communities provided with the language of rights, between the lawlessness of war times and democratic discourse. There must be a way of problematising the ideological mantra of Western freedom, of modernity’s moral superiority, that does not simply equate it with Nazi propaganda (Ogilvie 2001). Habermas and Honneth probably have a point when they highlight the advances made by modernity in the entrenchment of rights. If the ethical task is that of testimony, then our testimony should go also to all the individual lives that were freed from alienation by the establishment of legal barriers against arbitrariness and exclusion. We should heed Honneth’s reminder that struggles for social and political emancipation have often privileged the language of rights over any other discourse (Fraser, Honneth 2003). To reject the language of human rights altogether could be a costly gesture in understanding past political struggles in their relevance for future ones, and a serious strategic, political loss for accompanying present struggles. We want to criticise the ideology of human rights, but not at the cost of renouncing the resources that rights provide. Otherwise, critical theory would be in the odd position of casting aspersions upon the very people it purports to speak for, and of depriving itself of a major weapon in the struggle against oppression.

3. HUMAN RIGHTS GUARANTEE CITIZENS MEMBERSHIP IN A POLITICAL COMMUNITYJean-Philippe Deranty, professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, 2004. BORDERLANDS E-JOURNAL, Vol. 3, No. 1, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm

Agamben quotes Arendt’s critical conclusion: ‘the conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human’ (Arendt 1966: 299; Agamben 1998: 126). But he fails to quote the very next line, which makes all the difference: "The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of the human being" (Arendt 1966: 299). 18. What Arendt means is that only when they are realised in a political "commonwealth" do human rights have any meaning. They are an abstraction otherwise. More important than the right to freedom or the right to justice is "the right to have rights", that is, to be the member of a political community. Arendt therefore asserts the opposite of what Agamben wants to say: she believes that the political solution lies in what he considers to be a fiction, namely the citizen. Her point is that when man and citizen come apart, we realise that man never really existed as a subject of rights. This is the exact opposite of Agamben for whom the citizen is just a travesty.



A2: Agamben K – Human Rights Good – Resist Biopolitics

1. ARTICULATING HUMAN RIGHTS DEMANDS CAN CONTEST BIOPOLITICSAndrew Norris, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Winter 2000.DIACRITICS, Vol. 30, No. 4, p. 51.

Now, the mere existence of camps and of Versuchspersonen does not in itself signal the need for as sweeping and fundamental a critique of the tradition as Agamben's. For one might well conclude that what is called for is simply a reassertion of human rights as understood by the tradition; or, to put the point on the explanatory level, that the genocides and rape camps of contemporary politics are conceptually of a piece with the transgressions of James II and other "Beasts of Prey" and "noxious creatures." After all, Agamben himself characterizes the Versuchspersonen in just these terms: it is "precisely because they were lacking almost all the rights and expectations that we characteristically attribute to human existence" and yet were still alive that they could "be situated at a limit zone between life and death." On this account the horrors of modernity are nothing more than violations of the norms of the tradition—a tradition that simply needs to be reasserted, rather than criticized or deconstructed. And this response might seem sufficient even if one accepts, as Agamben does, Arendt's argument in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the emergence of the camps signals the extreme limitations of the politics of human rights. Arendt's argument is that the direct defense of human rights will alone be insufficient. On her account what is needed is rather a recognition of the ultimate basis of civil rights—what she terms the "right to have rights." 24 This basis Arendt finds in political action. Properly understood, human rights are civil rights: they are based on forms of human action, not a set of moral truths about the laws of God or nature. It is as political, not legal, actors that we are granted rights; and it is through political action that we defend those rights. But in the present case we might interpret this as nothing but a call to indirectly defend human rights, and not at all to question the distinction between political life and bare life upon which the conception of rights rests.

2. HUMAN RIGHTS ARE A KEY SITE OF POLITICAL STRUGGLE AGAINST DOMINATIONIan Balfour, professor of English at York University, and Eduardo Cadava, professor of English at Princeton University, Spring/Summer 2004.SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY, Vol. 103, No. 2/3, p. 277-278.

Human rights have become one of the most pressing and intractable matters of political life, and perhaps even of life as such. We might even say that there could be no life without human rights, without, at the very least, the right to live. This is why, from their very beginnings, human rights have always been—with and beyond all the praxes that seek to secure them—a way to think about what it means to be human, and what it means to have the right both to live and to be human. If, from the earliest declarations of the French Revolution (the generally accepted origin of human rights discourse) to the Declaration of Universal Human Rights that followed World War II, human rights have been continually broadened, elaborated, clarified, and defined, it is because they repeatedly have sought to include and address—often in response to the suffering, dispossession, and displacement that accompany the injustices and violence that constitute so much of the world's history—new rights. These rights include, among many others, women's rights, minority rights, children's rights, gay and lesbian rights, human rights beyond citizens' rights, the right to education, the right to work, the right to political participation, the right to resistance, the right to development, and a wide spectrum of economic and cultural rights. If human rights arrived relatively late on the scene of history, however—just over two hundred years ago—they not only have sought to formalize and expand civic and political rights that, even if understood within different contexts and under different names, already were partially in existence, but also have redefined the relation between human and political rights within a complex and shifting history that has not always been marked by linear progress. Nevertheless, there can be no denying that the idea and the facts of human rights—with their insistence on a rethinking of the relations and conflicts among rights, democracy, citizenship, sovereignty, statelessness, international law, violence, and humanitarian and military intervention—now inform the political agendas of countless nations and increasingly influential transnational institutions, from the United Nations to the mushrooming nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), among which Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are only the most well-known.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/v030/#FOOT24



A2: Agamben K – Bad Scholarship – Essentializes Human Rights

1. AGAMBEN’S REJECTION OF RIGHTS IS BASED ON OVER-HASTY ESSENTIALISMFrances Daly, research fellow in Philosophy at Australian National University, 2004.BORDERLANDS E-JOURNAL, Vol. 3, No. 1, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm

A significant part of Agamben's rejection of rights is based on the belief that rights necessarily involve processes by which values are made eternal. The argument as to whether there is a problem with the idea of eternal metajuridical values able to be inscribed within rights is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is the problem of what particular values we find inscribed, and by what process these values have been arrived at; secondly, there are certainly difficulties at issue with an understanding of what is eternal within such values. But such arguments often proceed on the basis of misplaced assumptions. Instead of indicating the actual nature of the problem with particular metajuridical values, or indeed indicating what, for example, a construction of an eternalized, homogeneous substrate would mean for the idea of a social contract or rights, it is presumed that, despite whatever it is that constitutes their content, it is such values themselves that are at fault. Agamben elides all difference by assuming that right has only judgment, calculation and control as its outcome, and that the basis of right is its place within the structure of the State. And yet right is not necessarily or merely a part of the State; rather it is better understood as practices on the part of human beings interacting within social forms (of which the State may or may not be a part).

2. AGAMBEN IGNORES THE VALUABLE USES OF RIGHTSFrances Daly, research fellow in Philosophy at Australian National University, 2004.BORDERLANDS E-JOURNAL, Vol. 3, No. 1, Accessed May 11, 2005, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm

Agamben views all such setting out of rights as essentially reintegrating those marginalized from citizenship into the fiction of a guaranteed community. Law only "wants to prevent and regulate" (Agamben, 2001: 1) – and it is certainly the case that much law does – but within rights, I argue, we can also detect a potential for justice. In contrast, Agamben contends that legal right and the law always operate in a double apparatus of pure violence and forms of life guaranteed by a Schmittian 'state of emergency' (Agamben, 2000: 43). And although he recognizes the dire consequences of a state of emergency with the eradication of the legal status of individuals, he views this as the force of law without law, as a mystical or fictional element, a space devoid of law, an 'empty legal space', or 'state of exception' as Carl Schmitt refers to it, that is essential to the legal order (Carl Schmitt, 1985: 6). What is then eliminated here is any sense of how the appeal to rights brings into question institutionalized unfreedom and why this underlying insufficiency between the idea of right and real need is opposed by those attempting to expand the realm of human rights. The problem with this strategy for doing away with any distinction and placing the refugee in a position of pure potentiality is that, instead of liberating or revolutionizing the place of the refugee, it creates an eternal present that is unable to connect the very real reality of difference with a critique of the society that victimizes the refugee in the manner with which we are currently so familiar.


A2: Agamben K – Bad Scholarship

1. AGAMBEN CLAIMS TO KNOW BARE LIFE WHICH BETRAYS HIS PURPOSEJohn Beverley, Professor of Cultural Studies at Pittsburgh University, 1999.SUBALTERNITY AND REPRESENTATION: ARGUMENTS IN CRITICAL THEORY, p. 39.

Those of us who are involved in the project of subaltern studies are often asked how we, who are, in the main, middle- or upper-middle-class academics at major research universities in the United States, can claim to represent the subaltern. But we do not claim to represent ("cognitively map," "let speak," "speak for," "excavate") the subaltern. Subaltern studies registers rather how the knowledge we construct and impart as academics is structured by the absence, difficulty, or impossibility of representation of the subaltern.

2. AGAMBEN ENGAGES IN THE DESIRE FOR OBJECTIVITY THAT BETRAYS HIS APPROACH TO HOMO SACERJohn Beverley, Professor of Cultural Studies at Pittsburgh University, 1999.SUBALTERNITY AND REPRESENTATION: ARGUMENTS IN CRITICAL THEORY, p. 39.

Richard Rorty distinguishes between what he calls the "desire for solidarity" and the "desire for objectivity": There are two principal ways in which reflective human beings try, by placing their lives in a larger context, to give sense to those lives. The first is by telling the story of their contribution to a community. This community may be the actual historical one in which they live, or another actual one, distant in time or place, or a quite imaginary one, consisting perhaps of a dozen heroes and heroines selected from history or fiction or both. The second way is to describe themselves as standing in an immediate relation to a non-human reality. This relation is immediate in the sense that it does not derive from a relation between such a reality and their tribe, or their nation, or their imagined band of comrades. I shall say that stories of the former kind exemplify the desire for solidarity, and that stories of the latter kind exemplify the desire for objectivity."

3. AGAMBEN’S POSITION DOES NOT COME TO GRIPS WITH ITS OWN ELITISMJohn Beverley, Professor of Cultural Studies at Pittsburgh University, 1999.SUBALTERNITY AND REPRESENTATION: ARGUMENTS IN CRITICAL THEORY, p. 69-70.

She was trying to show that behind the good faith of the liberal academic or the committed ethnographer or solidarity activist in allowing or enabling the subaltern to speak lies the trace of the colonial construction of an other—an other who is conveniently available to speak to us (with whom we can speak or feel comfortable speaking with). This neutralizes the force of the reality of difference and antagonism our own relatively privileged position in the global system might give rise to. Elzbieta Sklodowska has in mind something similar when she argues that, despite its appeal to the authority of an actual subaltern voice, testimonio is in fact a staging of the subaltern by someone who is not subaltern, as in Lyotard's notion of the differend (where a dispute is carried out according to the terms and language of one of the parties to the dispute).

4. AGAMBEN IGNORES HIS POSITION AS NARRATOR RELATIVE TO THE SUBJECTJohn Beverley, Professor of Cultural Studies at Pittsburgh University, 1999.SUBALTERNITY AND REPRESENTATION: ARGUMENTS IN CRITICAL THEORY, p. 70.

The appeal to authenticity and victimization in the critical validation of testimonio stops the semiotic play of the text, Sklodowska implies, fixing the subject in a unidirectional gaze that deprives it of its reality. Fixes the testimonial narrator as a subject, that is, but also fixes us as subjects in what Althusser would have called a relation of double specularity created by the idealization or sublimation of subaltern otherness, which in the end also isolates us from our reality.

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AGAMBEN CRITICISM SHELL - wcdebate.com · Web viewIt is the suspension of such procedures that, according to Giorgio Agamben, characterizes the state of emergency, in which all